Route to the Soul

A romantic mixture of emotion and practical tips from two young students discovering themselves and life as they recount their adventures away from home. The Student and her boyfriend share their passion for each other, travel and their pursuit of a healthy lifestyle.

Travel

Transcription of travel diaries made during the last 36 years starting with India and Nepal 1981 and including USA 1983, Syria 1993, South America 2000 and South Africa 2014 together with photographs. This is a work in progress as the diaries are transcribed, so check for updates.

This is a transcription of the diary I made when travelling to India for the first time. It was 1981 and I had never been outside Europe before. Travelling alone to India and Nepal was a great experience.

I have been to many places around the world since but this journey remains the most memorable. Like most young people at the time I had to travel on a small budget and this undoubtedly meant I got to meet more local people and experience the real hospitality of India than if I had stayed in large hotels and travelled by car.

What follows is transcribed with few changes from my original handwritten diary, scrawled into a journalist style notebook. It almost certainly reflects my youth and limited experience and probably the attitudes of the time but I hope it conveys something of the atmosphere, sights and sounds that I still remember so well.

The photographs were taken with a completely manual Olympus N1 camera and using Kodak Kodachrome 25 film (with one 64 purchased in Kathmandu and already well out of date) and were scanned around ten years ago for an earlier web site, dust and all. I hope you will excuse the less than perfect quality the digital age taught us to expect. The colour of the originals is much better, but scanning and image processing - especially to generate images of less than 20Kb - was a challenge I didn't master particularly well.